Barn floor
We put some more of those green
house tables to good use
on the new barn floor project.
The floor panels will have to
wait until the golf cart parts show up so we can shuttle them back the
easy way.
I might even have them cut in
half to make the hauling a bit easier.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Congratulations on putting a floor in, it will make the space much more useful. However, don't use cinder blocks turned sideways like shown in your photo, they aren't meant for a load in that orientation. For a load bearing situation, they need to be oriented with the cells upright, as if you were building a brick wall.
Good luck!
well, I must admit that the construction of the supports looked less than stellar to me, to put it mildly. But I don't want to be the person who complains about everything.
Besides, structures are usually quite overbuilt. You could lose one or two supports without strength problems once the floorboards are in place and screwed down, I think. The reasons for that are multiple, but they boil down to two things. First, it is common to multiply expected loads with a safety factor, and use that higher load for laying out the structure. This is reflected in building codes and engineering training worldwide. Second, if you built a structure out of wood that was just strong enough, it would flex so much that nodoby would want to walk on it.
Incidentally, in this case the orientation of the cinderblocks doesn't matter, since the joiste only rest on the ends; the loads from the joists are transmitted through the vertical end faces of the blocks only. But if you were to shift the blocks so that the joist rested on the horizontal face inbetween the vertical "walls" of the cinderblock, James would have a very good point indeed. You would be bending a concrete plate, producing compression loads in the top of the plate and tension loads in the bottom. Now, cement and concrete can withstand huge compression loads, but only very small tension loads. That is why those slender concrete bridges that one sees are made out of pretensioned reinforced concrete with embedded steel bars or cables to carry the tension loads. The steel is pretensioned to prevent the concrete from cracking.
Roland --- I think it helps that the flooring going down is a solid inch. When I went out there to bounce on the first piece this evening, it felt extremely sturdy.
Very good info about the strength of concrete!